I’m an Immigrant. Stop Calling Me an Expat.

Hello, my name is Dominus, and I’m an immigrant

I have lived in Spain for nearly nine years, and in that time I’ve filled in more official forms than I ever did in the RAF Police, which takes some doing. Padrón, residency, health card, the endless photocopies that Spanish bureaucracy still treats as a sacrament… I’ve signed my name on all of them. Not one has ever offered me a box marked “expat”. The Spanish state, it turns out, has no interest whatsoever in the flattering version of who I am.

So let me save it the trouble. I’m an immigrant. I’m a 66-year-old British man living in a cave dwelling on the edge of Orce, a village of around 850 people up in the high country of Granada province, and I came here from another country with every intention of staying. That’s not a lifestyle brand. That’s the dictionary definition, and it doesn’t come with a cocktail umbrella.

I say this because I keep hearing the other word. I hear it in bars on the coast, in Facebook groups called “Brits in [insert province here]”, and from people who will tell you, in the very same breath, that Britain has “let too many of them in”. Expat. It rolls off the tongue so much more comfortably, doesn’t it? It sounds like someone who chose this, someone with a pension, a sea view and a return ticket they’ll probably never use. Immigrant sounds like someone who needed to come. And there, in one tidy little piece of vocabulary, sits a pecking order most of us never voted for but use every single day.

A word that does a lot of heavy lifting

Expat is short for expatriate, from the Latin ex, “out of”, and patria, “homeland”. On paper it means exactly what immigrant means, just viewed from the other end of the journey: one word describes leaving, the other describes arriving. You’d think that would make them interchangeable. You’d be wrong, and almost everyone knows you’d be wrong, even if they’d never say so out loud.

People have actually measured this. When the linguist Nicholas Subtirelu ran both words through an enormous database of English as it’s used on the web, he found “immigrant” turned up far more often next to words describing people of colour… including, tellingly, the word “non-white”. In 2015 the writer Mawuna Remarque Koutonin put it more bluntly in a widely shared article: in practice, expat is reserved for white Westerners abroad, and everyone else is an immigrant. Same act, different word, depending on where you’re from and what you look like.

And here’s the bit that stings. When the journalist Laura Secorun argued the word should be retired altogether, the picture she reached for wasn’t a banker in Dubai or an engineer in Singapore. It was a couple of British retirees with their Agatha Christie paperbacks, slowly roasting under the Spanish sun. She wasn’t describing some abstract colonial relic. She was describing us.

It isn’t only about race, though that’s the part people get most defensive about. It’s about money, class and the assumption of choice. Expat suggests adventure and an open door behind you; immigrant, in too many mouths, suggests a burden. The word works like a velvet rope. It lets us stand in the same queue at the extranjería office as the Moroccan farm labourer and the Romanian care worker, while quietly insisting we’re in a different queue altogether.

The numbers don’t care what we call ourselves

According to Spain’s National Statistics Institute, 266,462 UK citizens were registered as residents on 1 January 2025. The British-born population peaked at around 298,000 just after the referendum and has been slipping back ever since, and roughly four in ten of us are 65 or over. British nationals sit consistently in the top three foreign nationalities living in Spain, alongside Moroccans and Romanians. Read that line again, slowly, if you’re someone who likes the word expat. Statistically speaking, we’re in the same sentence.

In some places the word “community” doesn’t quite cover it. In Arboleas, over in Almería, 2,071 of the town’s 4,182 residents are British citizens… very nearly half. In Rojales, on the Alicante coast, it’s close to three in ten. Imagine a market town in Lincolnshire where half the population were Spanish, drank in their own bars, read their own newspapers and couldn’t order a pint in English. Imagine the headlines. Now imagine they insisted on being called expats.

As for integration, the older research makes for awkward reading. A 2005 study reported by the Economic and Social Research Council surveyed 340 British migrants in Málaga province and found around a third rarely or never met Spanish people outside shops and restaurants, while 60% didn’t speak Spanish well. Things have moved on for some, to be fair: a later British Embassy survey of nearly 1,600 residents found more than half said they spoke Spanish regularly with friends and neighbours. But “more than half of the people who chose to answer an embassy integration survey” isn’t quite the ringing endorsement it’s dressed up as, and I’d wager the folk who never learned the word for bread weren’t the ones filling in the form.

The view from the sun lounger

This is where it gets uncomfortable, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Some of the loudest voices against immigration I’ve ever heard belong to British people who are, themselves, immigrants. They sit in the sunshine on a Spanish residency card, use the Spanish health service, and complain that Britain is being “overrun” by people who won’t learn the language, won’t integrate and stick to their own. You couldn’t make it up. Well, you could, but any decent editor would send it back for being far too on the nose.

Because if we’re honest, the charge sheet reads exactly the same. Clustering together in enclaves? See Arboleas. Not learning the language? See above. Running parallel institutions… English-language papers, English bars, English radio, British schools? There are more than fifty member schools in the National Association of British Schools in Spain alone. Every complaint the tabloids aim at a street in Bradford could be aimed, word for word, at a street on the Costa Blanca. The only real difference is who’s doing the complaining, and what we let them call themselves while they do it.

Which, I think, is the real job the word expat does. It isn’t a description at all. It’s an exemption. It lets a man be an immigrant on Monday and anti-immigration on Tuesday without ever noticing the contradiction, because the word keeps the two halves of him in separate rooms. A Spaniard in Peterborough is a migrant; a Brit in Benidorm is a lifestyle choice. Same act, same budget airline, different vocabulary… and the vocabulary is doing all the moral work.

Before anyone gets comfortable… including me

It would be very easy to write all this from a great height, so let me climb down a bit. I grew up in a service family, and a good chunk of my formative years were spent abroad, in Germany and Norway. If you want to see the expat bubble in its purest, most government-funded form, look at a British forces community during the Cold War: British schools, the NAAFI, British Forces radio, British everything… a little England behind a wire fence, where most of us never needed more than a handful of words in the local language. I didn’t choose it, I was a child, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t absorb the idea that you could live in someone else’s country without ever really living in it.

And now? My Spanish is a daily effort and a permanent work in progress. I try, every single day, with the neighbours and in the village, and I still mangle verbs in ways that make people smile politely and answer slowly. I live inland rather than in a coastal enclave, but I’m not handing myself a medal for that. I’m still the foreigner in the room, and I always will be.

Here’s the bit that genuinely stopped me in my tracks while writing this. A while ago I seriously considered moving back to the UK. I sat down and priced it up properly, and the sums were brutal: going home would have meant a far lower standard of living than the one I have here. So I stayed, for economic reasons. There’s a term for someone who moves to, or stays in, another country because the money works out better there, and it isn’t expat. It’s economic migrant… the very phrase that gets spat out on the evening news about people in small boats. I’m a retired man in a cave with a few chickens, not a young lad on a dinghy, and I’m not for one moment suggesting our circumstances are comparable. But the logic that keeps me here is the same logic, and I’d rather own it than dress it up in linen.

The case for the defence

In fairness, there are decent arguments on the other side, and some of them come from people I respect. The most common is that the words genuinely mean different things. Strictly speaking, an expat is someone posted abroad for a spell who expects to go home: the oil engineer, the diplomat, the teacher on a two-year contract. Plenty of Brits in Spain still think of the UK as home, keep a foot in both camps and come and go with the seasons. For them, “immigrant” feels like a claim to a permanence they’ve never actually chosen, and that isn’t racism. It’s an honest description of a life lived between two places.

There’s also a fair point that this is a squabble about labels, when what really matters is how people live. Some Brits who call themselves expats speak lovely Spanish, volunteer locally and know their neighbours’ grandchildren by name. Some who’d happily call themselves immigrants wouldn’t recognise the mayor if he sold them a loaf. Swapping one word for another changes nothing about how you behave, and there’s a definite whiff of performance about comfortable foreigners competing to see who can be the most humble.

Then there’s the view from the Spanish side, which is often more relaxed than you’d expect. Research on Scandinavian pensioners in Spain found most Spaniards don’t regard poor language skills or thin integration as a major problem, so long as the newcomers respect Spanish law. Up here in the interior, where villages like Orce have been quietly losing people for years, a foreigner who turns up, pays their taxes and keeps a light on is broadly welcome, whatever they choose to call themselves. Which rather makes me wonder whether the word only really bothers some of us because we know exactly what we’d say if the roles were reversed.

What it says on the card

My residency card is a TIE: Tarjeta de Identidad de Extranjero. Foreigner’s Identity Card. Spain doesn’t do flattery on its laminated documents, and I’ve come to rather like that about it. The card doesn’t ask whether I came for the sunshine, the cheap wine or the lower cost of living. It simply records the fact: I’m from somewhere else, and I live here now.

I’m not asking anyone to wear a badge. I’m asking for something smaller, and harder. If you’ve crossed a border to build a life, stop reserving a nicer word for yourself than the one you’d use for the man who cleans the hotel pool, or the woman picking tomatoes in the plastic greenhouses of Almería. The moment you use the honest word about yourself, it gets an awful lot harder to use it as an insult about anyone else. That’s the whole trick. That’s precisely why so many people would rather not.

Would it change anything? Probably not much, not at first. Nobody’s mind was ever changed by a dictionary. But I’ve started saying it out loud now, in conversation with other Brits, and the reactions are telling. Some laugh. Some nod. A few go very quiet and look down at their drinks, as though I’ve said something faintly indecent. I haven’t decided yet which of those reactions tells me the most… but I know which one I’m watching for.

Until Next Time